Practitioner effectiveness

Why Continuing Professional Development?

Continuing Professional Development is an essential part of professional practice. These measures are simple to use and provide good evidence of a practitioner’s competence. The recommended scales, built into supervision, are the WAI and BPRS.

Working Alliance Inventory - WAI

The WAI was designed to rate how well a service user and practitioner work together. The original 36 item scale has been reduced to a 12 item scale for service users and 10 item for practitioners. Easy to use and has extensive independent evaluation.

  • Timeframe :: last month

  • Completion time :: five minutes

  • Scoring :: All items are scored 1-2-3-4-5 giving a maximum of 60 for service users and 50 for practitioners.

  • Cut-off score :: No cut-off scores have been suggested. The higher the score the better.

  • Licence: copyright the Society for Psychotherapy Research

References

There are plenty of references to be found. These are selected as most relevant.

Cecero JJ, Fenton LR, Nich C, Frankforter TL and Carroll KM (2001) Focus on therapeutic Alliance: the psychometric properties of six measures across three treatments. Psychotherapy 38: 1-11

Miragall M, Baños RM, Cebolla A and Botella C (2015) Working alliance inventory applied to virtual and augmented reality (WAI-VAR): psychometrics and therapeutic outcomes. Frontiers in Psychology Published online

Brief Process Rating Scale - BPRS

Process assessment by an independent rater enables the agency/practitioner/team to assess standards of practice including therapeutic technique, therapeutic alliance, specific and non- specific aspects of treatment, which might affect outcome. There are 12 core therapist skills that can be applied to any treatment that is based on cognitive behavioural principals. The Brief Process Rating Scale rates the extent that these skills are used in any given session and how well they are used.

  • Timeframe :: a treatment session

  • Completion time :: need to view the whole session

  • Scoring :: Frequency items are scored 0-1-2 giving a maximum of 24. Quality items are scored 0-1-2; these items are only scored of the skill was used, namely a frequency score of 1 or 2

  • Cut-off score :: No cut-off points have been suggested

  • Licence: BY-NC-ND

  • User manual available…

References

Tober G, Clyne W, Finnegan O, Farrin A and Russell I in collaboration with the UKATT Research Team (2008) Validation of a Scale for Rating the Delivery of Psycho-Social Treatments for Alcohol Dependence and Misuse: The UKATT Process Rating Scale (PRS). Alcohol & Alcoholism 43: 675–682

Other therapeutic alliance scales

The Penn Helping Alliance Questionnaire - HAQ

California Psychotherapy Alliance Scale - CALPAS

Other process rating scales

Yale Adherence and Competence Scale - YACS

Motivational Interviewing Skill Code - MISC

More pages about outcomes measurement…

Check out these measures of: substance use, dependence, recovery, wellbeing, and mental health